Alma Bryan

Of the four artists in this section of the MFA show, Alma Bryan’s work is the most ephemeral, fleeting. “Through the merest suggestion of introverted content, my work explores light lyrically and objectively," she explains. These small drawings result from a spiritual commitment on the part of the artist; they are in fact rendered after meditation on Biblical texts, which are inscribed on the back of the pieces.

The recorded gestures are intense, confident and direct. There’s not a lot of modulation; it’s a democratic accumulation of equally emphatic lines. “The care of my hand is evident in the drawings, which have a narrative that remains quietly elusive,” says the artist.

Bryan’s references to introversion and elusive narrative, while reflective of her own nature, also speak to her choice of an aesthetic approach with values such as indirection, subtlety, quiet and observation. Concludes the artist, “It is among this set of ideas--introversion, explorations of light, the record of my hand, and narrative--that the work fights to find itself.”

Lindsay Coats

In American mythology the crossroads is where everyday life meets destiny, where good meets evil, where life meets death; it is where opposites meet. For Lindsay Coats the image of a horse on the surface of her painting is a crossroads. “The horse is a conduit between the viewer and myself. I call these interactions ‘meetings.’”

There are three elements in the equation that creates such a meeting: the artist’s subjectivity; the viewer’s perception of the artwork; and the medium for their interaction, which is the world. The world could be embodied in a human face but Coats finds that “portraits are too loaded, too specific. We’re too savvy, there’s too much baggage, too many clues that lead us astray from a connection.” The artist prefers to use the horse as that link between herself and her audience. “I am connected to the horse by experience and the viewer and I communicate through it.” The works are “just a meeting between a human and its age-old partner, the horse.”

This neat formulation is made more psychologically complex because at the same time that the art acts as a site for the meeting of artist and audience via the horse, it also is an occasion for self-portraiture. “The paintings are intuitive self-portrait by proxy,” her peers have said of Coats’ work. “Each painting is a marker of me at the time, as well as my reaction to what might have been happening in the world.”

Coats also undercuts the three-way algebra of her work by employing tiny horsehead sculptures that she devises. Thus a complicating factor that lies between her consciousness and the painted surface—before the viewer gets a chance to participate—is the weight of an object that mediates her hand. The fact that she fashioned that object—in a near frenzy of quick expression—truly adds to the layering of the final works. Coats agrees with the words of her colleagues: “I am compelled to reveal something essential, sincere and honest for me in the landscape of a horse’s face.”

Elisabeth O’Connor

My mother has an irrational fear of dogs. If one comes within 20 yards of her she gets very anxious. She insists that she never had a particular trauma around dogs; dogs just embody all her fears and the unhappiness of a lifetime. Elisabeth O’Connor’s sculptures are totems of the same caliber. They are the archetypal evil forces of dreams in the form of four-legged animals; more importantly they’re dark, vague, menacing and inhuman. She says, “I investigate the anthropomorphized object as a stand-in for what is unvoiced and mysterious.” When she says, “I am making work to dream in front of,” one knows these dreams are not pleasant ones.

O’Connor creates the work “from an inventory of culture’s cast-off comfort objects: disassembled plush animal ‘skins,’ bathrobes and bathmats, knit Afghans, and the like. Draped sopping wet with watery dirt, cement, clay and glue over armatures, and frantically tied, bound and wired into place, the pieces are built in a visceral and urgent manner.”

The artist sees these beings as exemplars of her anger and fear and utterly synonymous with the conflict and tension of the day’s political realities. They are actors from an unnamed “fable or morality tale,” specimens form “natural history museum dioramas” crossed with “the art of the grotesque.” O’Connor takes up the French 19th century call to pursue truth and beauty via the dark side of existence. She ultimately does discover a sympathy for the rotten, a certain tenderness emerging from their raw surfaces, a reconciliation.

O’Connor summarizes, “At the same time that I am drawing the viewer into the allegory, the animal imagery is also evoking a sense of childhood dream, an innocent love for the pastoral.”

Jessica Wimbley

Whenever a people finds itself in a minority status within a larger culture, disadvantages, from the gross to the subtle, are inevitable. One way to address these economic or social imbalances is through taking a hard look at how people are represented, whether in language or visual material. “My work scrutinizes contemporary society’s appetite for mediated images of African-Americans,” says Jessica Wimbley, adding, “These fetishized images turn people into commodities and objects.”

Wimbley utilizes the collage form at the scale of room-sized installation art in her work. Using an amalgam of found images and original work, she tends toward the overwhelming and the excessive rather than minimal and low-key end of the arts spectrum. “The juxtaposition of appropriated images in the work calls to question how mediated identities inform our understanding and misunderstanding of race, and furthermore, questions how we frame identity,” she states.

These found images are formed into artist-made wallpaper, over which other found and made drawings and paintings are arranged. In addition, a suite of drawings that refer to logic, or formulas, are offered. These parody simplistic reductions of complex ideas and concerns within the African-American community. As Wimbley concludes, “I utilize an inventory of images, varying from American popular culture to specific tropes in African-American culture, to construct unsolvable equations and diagrams.”